Commonly, beverage cans of the type noted above are marketed in packages comprising four, six, eight, or twelve cans arranged in substantially rectangular arrays and retained in machine-applied carriers made from single sheets of resilient polymeric material, such as low density polyethylene. The carriers are made, as by die-cutting, so as to have band segments defining container-receiving apertures.
As exemplified in Klygis et al. U.S. Pat. No. 4,974,726, it is known to cover such cans with a separate sheet, which is clipped onto the cans to enhance such a package. A package of related interest is disclosed in Suffern U.S. Pat. No. 4,191,290.
Since shelf space in a modern supermarket must be strictly allocated among a great diversity of different products, it has been proposed to stack one such package comprising four or six cans on a like package and to sell the stacked packages as a unitized package.
When beverage cans are stacked on one another, one concern that must be addressed is that the lower ends of the upper cans tend to interlock with the upper ends of the lower cans, particularly if pull tabs are provided on the upper ends of the respective cans.
A need has arisen, to which this invention is addressed, for an effective way to unitize such stacked packages.